Digitizing video frame for printing

[Dag Spicer]

Hi there,
Trying to help a former operator of a digital portrait scanning booth ‘back in the day…’ He writes:

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IN 1976, I worked at "get your portrait by computer" store.

The heart of the system was a 16 bit, Data General, Nova II computer.

A black and white, analog, standard definition CCTV camera was tethered to a "digitizer" box that was connected to the computer.

The photographer hit the ‘Capture’ button on the "Digitizer" box to instantaneously freeze the image and "digitize" it.

The image was then sent to a Centronics, 102AL, 7 pin, dot matrix printer to print.  A perceived grey scale of 26 shades was created by numbers and letters.

What I am trying to find out is what the "Digitizer" box was and how it worked.  Ram?  Tape loop?  I DO know that it said 'Digital Image Systems' on the outside but have not been able to learn more.
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Can anyone help with more information about DIS or generically about these systems? They were popular in shopping malls for a few years in the mid-70s…

Thanks for any tips!

Dag
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Dag Spicer
Senior Curator
Computer History Museum

1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94043
dspicer at computerhistory.org<mailto:dspicer at computerhistory.org>